Choosing a church giving software should be pretty easy, right? You know you need a system that will make giving easy for your church members and visitors, allows you to easily communicate to your church and is easy to manage. But you’ve probably realized it’s actually not so easy to choose after doing some research online and seeing how many options are out there. It’s exhausting trying to compare all the options available. Choosing a system for your church is an important decision, and you need to find an online giving solution that is going to be the right fit for your church.  

So how do you decide what online giving platform is best for your church? Find out now by learning about each of the top five online software options for churches. We’ve compared the top five church giving platforms by researching their features, giving tools and cost to help you in your decision about which church giving software will be the best fit for your church.  

Paperless Transaction Corporation has a very attractive online giving platform. Paperless is the only software to offer the services of mass text alert campaigns and integrated email giving campaigns. Paperless Transaction Corporation offers straight-forward, discounted pricing for churches. Compared to the other top giving platforms, their pricing was the most competitive and they have the lowest credit card processing rates (1.75 percent plus $0.22 per transaction). Their rate on each transaction ends up being less than two percent. Paperless is a great platform because they offer the most innovative solutions combined with cost-effective, secure payment processing that is easy to integrate with your current church database and website.  

PayPal is a well established and popular online giving platform. Because it’s a household name, most donors already have PayPal accounts. PayPal is very easy to set up, and there are no setup fees. However, their transaction fees are one of the highest at 2.2 percent, plus 30 cents per transaction. PayPal offers many tools such as custom email receipting, Facebook donations and mobile card readers, but it is the only software on our list that does not support text giving, which we believe is essential for communicating with donors today. PayPal’s “donate” buttons are very easy to add to your website, but PayPal does not offer any customization to match the branding and website of your church.  

Pushpay has their own mobile app and their focus is on that mobile app and driving everything to mobile. Pushpay’s platform is very easy to use, and it only takes 10 seconds to make a donation with Pushpay. The downside is that Pushpay’s mobile giving experience happens through their own company mobile app and not through the church’s own branding mobile giving page which could create donor friction and cause some donors to abandon their donation. PushPay is the most expensive out of the top giving software companies, with a minimum monthly fee of $99 and average credit card transaction fee of $2.50. 

SecureGive is a church-specific software provider. SecureGive was the creator of the first church giving kiosk and that is their niche. Their kiosks can be customized with graphics and provide card present software. SecureGive offers some robust solutions, but they are the most expensive church platform on the market today. Since SecureGive’s focus is on kiosks, the cost savings they present is on retail card swipe processing, which is minimal in digital church giving. Card Not Present processing is the most common type of processing and billed at the highest rates by SecureGive. 

EasyTithe is an attractive giving software option because they offer a lot of features at a pretty competitive price (1.99 percent plus $0.30 per transaction). They are the only platform besides Paperless to offer tools in addition to online giving such as Event Registration and Custom Storefront Pages. However, unlike Paperless, EasyTithe does not offer custom email receipting and mobile card readers.

This article has been adapted from Paperless Transactions, an Influence Partner. PTC offers innovative solutions such as mobile giving, event registration and donor management combined with cost-effective, secure payment processing that is easy to integrate with your current database and website. To learn more about Paperless Transactions, click here.